The Healing Presence

"Few realize the Healing Presence is dual in nature effecting both the destruction of what must be renewed or reformed and the construction of what is to have embodied continuity. It is the Erotic Lover’s dance between Thanatos and Libido in dualistic Temporality. Nothing can endure in time and space unless in a constant and simultaneous dynamic of destruction/construction"...Brugh Joy

The Healing Presence is an emanation or attribute of the Heart Center. At the foundation of all Brugh Joy's teaching was the Heart, the Anahata, the Heart Center as the apex of Human Spritual Development.

Victimization

"When you victimize, whether we are talking about feeling victimized because you had an unhappy childhood, or something else, this holds you in an earlier stage, and it is a way to disown the very thing that you are pointing the finger at.

The child can’t take it on, he can’t take on the persecutor, that is too annihilating to a child, but as an adult you can carry your share of the shadow, and then you begin to see other facets in terms of what comes out of such kinds of experiences.

Rejecting your roots costs you your soul. Enter a vehicle of consciousness that can take on deeper mysteries, instead of saying that it should have been different, for instance, I should have had a happier life. When the time comes to take on deeper material events begin to happen, we are called into certain circumstances and you begin to feel a new current, a new wave, a renewal, and something that you could never get into before: that all of your experiences helped set the stage to develop other resources, and this is an extraordinarily enrichening process.” Excerpted from the Call of the Ancestors Conference by our friend Alicia Schmoller

And mine as well. Victimization- the idea that someone else is the cause of your suffering- works directly against self-realization. As long it's about someone else, you have wasted the opportunity to learn more about yourself. Brugh's teaching of "the pointing finger" speaks to this directly, and offers a conscious way to realize our projections, and to reintegrate them, thus expanding our awareness of self. It's very easy to begin to use this method for self-realization. Just find anyone you blame for anything, and start there. If you seek your own participation and follow it, you will always find the villain within yourself, because it was always there to begin with. This is also the essence of forgiveness. Without it, no deeper understanding is possible. Tat tvam asi. Thou art that.

David, your additions and insights are welcomed! To Navya and others who touch in here and on our other vehicles for Echoes of Joy, we appreciate your participation. Alicia and I have been carrying the primary responsibility for the offerings being presented; i.e. pictures & wisdom quotes, our resources are limited and what we invite now is partnership. Here is the link for our facebook page; https://www.facebook.com/echoesofjoy.

A recent analysis of past studies highlights the health benefits of music, dance, and art therapy.

On the whole, people with cancer who were assigned to creative arts treatments reported less depression, anxiety, and pain and a better quality of life during the programs than those who were put on a wait list or continued receiving usual care. For example, in one 2010 study, listening to half an hour of familiar music cut reported pain levels at least in half for 42 percent of hospitalized patients, while just eight percent of those in a comparison group saw relief.

Do you regularly try to motivate yourself with self-criticism and mental projections about all the bad things that will happen to you if you don’t get it together? While this approach may create that extra surge of adrenaline to meet your work deadline, cold call the next potential client, get to the gym, or get your house cleaned before the in-laws visit, it comes at a cost. You end up feeling bad about yourself a lot of the time.

You get into constant “fight or flight” mode, trying to avoid the negative imagined consequences, which messes with your cortisol and other stress hormones. You get overwhelmed, and decide to zone out playing video games or posting mindlessly on social media, or you rebel and eat, drink, or spend too much, thus creating more self-disgust. If this sounds familiar, perhaps you need a healthy dose of self-compassion.

Steve Hickman, Psy.D., Executive Director of the UC San Diego Center for Mindfulness joins William Mobley, MD, PhD for a discussion of how to be present in the moment and leverage the practice of mindfulness to stay engaged, focused, and fulfilled.

Reclamation of Patterns and Events

“There are many layers and doors to open in the reclamation of patterns and events in one’s life. If you are operating from the mythic pattern that some things should not have happened, you can´t see very much.

If you are willing to set aside the ”it should not have happened”, and asking the forbidden question, “What is this, and how can I apprentice myself to the deeper mystery?”, instead of trying to change things, this is beginning to appreciate larger unfoldments or deeper experiences in the realm of the Transcendent, and the consequences of actually carrying collective projections, what causes the individuals to carry it, what deeper things are being served in such mysteries, way beyond the idea of “I don’t like it”.

As we grow, we begin to realize that the very things that make us uncomfortable are the very things that have enormous transformative power. So we have to surrender the pleasure principle into carrying something else.

Discover if you have the vehicle of consciousness – and that “if” is a big, big, underlined question mark that every person has to assess when we begin to do the deeper work: do you have the vehicle of consciousness to carry what you could not carry as an earlier manifestation of the mystery that you represent?

Remember that the soul is in a transformative flowering and unfolding, and what was very appropriate at one stage is very inapproriate at a later stage.

Enter a vehicle of consciousness that can take on deeper mysteries, instead of saying that it should have been different, for instance, I should have had a happier life.

When the time comes to take on deeper material, events begin to happen, we are called into certain circumstances and you begin to feel a new current, a new wave, a renewal, and something that you could never get into before: that all of your experiences helped set the stage to develop other resources, and this is an extraordinarily enrichening process.” – Brugh Joy.

Decades of research have found that introversion, emotional sensitivity, and vulnerability to negativity—seeing the glass as half empty—are all common personality traits of highly creative people. They are also common symptoms of depression. In fact, artists and writers are eight to ten times as likely as the general population to suffer from mood disorders. Many studies speculate that this is because artists tend to examine their lives more deeply than the average person and that they draw on unpleasant experiences to feed their work.

“Creative people might be more likely to experience negative emotions,” says Wendy Berry Mendes, the Sarlo/Ekman associate professor of emotion at the University of California, San Francisco, who conducted a study while at Harvard University to look at how mood change can affect creativity. In one study, researchers measured levels of DHEAS (dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate), a hormone that when at lower-than-normal levels is associated with depression, before people received either harsh negative criticism or positive feedback in a mock job interview. Then the subjects were assigned a creative task. “Receiving negative compared to positive feedback was associated with enhanced creativity,” says Berry Mendes. “This was especially the case for individuals who had lower levels of DHEAS,” indicating they were predisposed to depression.

There are different forms of mediation practice -- among them Transcendental Meditation or "TM" (a Hollywood-approved technique heralded by David Lynch), Qigoing (a Chinese form of "energy healing"), and even yoga -- all of which carry their own array of benefits; however mindfulness meditation is one of the more widely used, and most heavily researched methods.

Two years ago researchers at Justus Liebig-University in Giessen, Germany and Harvard Medical School integrated decades of existing research into a comprehensive conjectural report, which explains the various neurological and conceptual processes through which mindfulness mediation works (and which recent studies have continued to affirm.)

The report suggests that mindfulness meditation operates through a combination of several distinct mechanisms: attention regulation, body awareness, emotion regulation, and a change in perspective on the self. Each component is believed to assist us in various aspects of our lives, and when functioning together, the cumulative process claims to lend an enhanced capacity for "self-regulation" -- the ability to control our own "thought, affect, behavior, or attention" (The loss of which has been cited as the cause of much psychological distress and suffering).

In other words, the researchers suggest that the practice allows us to develop a stronger command over the machinery of the mind, a dexterity which, according to a study released this week, stays with you long after you finish meditating.

As the first paragraph says, there are many methods of meditation (many more, in fact, than the ones mentioned here). It's quite a disservice to the historical tradition(s) of meditation that only a very few methods are dominating the field of research.

The scope of research is also limited (so far) to the cognitive, mental, neurological and sometimes behavioral benefits of meditation. It's still a good thing that meditation is getting such attention. Just be aware when reading about such studies that they are inherently limited, and meditation has far more depth and width.

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